Hezekiah's Fourteenth Year: The King's Illness and the Babylonian Embassy / מאירועי שנת ארבע-עשרה לחזקיהו: מחלת המלך וביקור המשלחת הבבלית

The historical and chronological crux 'in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah' (2 Kings 18:13), which introduces the prophetic narratives in 2 Kings 18—20, is re-examined through a study of the redactional features of the narrative of Hezekiah's illness (2 Kings 20:1—11). It is shown that the divine promise to deliver Jerusalem and the Davidic king from the Assyrian threat (2 Kings 20:6) is integral within its context, while the very same verse in 2 Kings 19:34 is secondary. Thus, the 'illness narrative' must originally have preceeded the narrative of Sennacherib's campaign to Judah (2 Kings 18:13—19:37). The prophetic cycle opened with the date 'in the fourteenth year', and was followed by the 'illness narrative', by the story of the Merodach-baladan embassy and, finally, by the Sennacherib campaign. The date formula 'in the fourteenth year', together with the promise of an additional fifteen years (2 Kings 20:6), yields 29 years, the total of years of the entire reign of Hezekiah as given in the chronological framework of 2 Kings (18:2). The present ordering of the text, with the 'illness narrative' following the Sennacherib campaign, evolved as a result of late editing. It was influenced by the late pre-exilic story of the Babylonian embassy, highly critical of Hezekiah. This story is not from the hand of the same writer who presented the positive evaluation of Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18:1—12.